Soucouyant by David Chariandy🍁

200 pages

By the award-winning author of Brother

Finalist, Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction

Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Winner, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (GOLD), Literary Fiction

Shortlisted for Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book

Shortlisted for City of Toronto Book Award

Shortlisted for the Amazon. ca/Books In Canada First Novel Award

Shortlisted for the ReLit Award, Best Novel

Shortlisted for One Book, One Vancouver

Featured on CBC's "Between the Covers"

A soucouyant is an evil spirit in Caribbean folklore and a symbol here of the distant and dimly remembered legacies that continue to haunt the Americas. This extraordinary first novel set in Ontario, in a house near the Scarborough Bluffs, focuses on a Canadian-born son who despairingly abandons his Caribbean-born mother suffering from dementia.

The son returns after two years to confront his mother but also a young woman who now mysteriously occupies the house. In his desire to atone for his past and live anew, he is compelled to imagine his mother's life before it all slips into darkness--her arrival in Canada during the early sixties, her childhood in Trinidad during World War II, and her lurking secret that each have tried to forget.